Bio

Drawing on her 20 years of practical experience in the arts and facilitation fields, Tanisha Christie’s work is focused on health/mental health, individual, families and couples; arts-based interventions; addiction recovery; critical consciousness; and liberation-based healing practices. As a facilitator, Ms. Christie has created curricula and processes for staff and young people in the arts, supported teachers and principals on classroom management strategies, and helped burgeoning not-for-profits create new systems and tackle difficult organizational situations. Clients included: Children’s Trust Neighborhood Initiative, Federation of East Village Artists, Black Alliance for Just Immigration, Newark Public Schools, and others. Most recently, she developed a creative workshop program for men in addiction recovery and young girls in transitional housing for Turning Point in Brooklyn.

As an theater artist Tanisha has produced, directed and performed for many regional theaters across the country, including Arena Stage; Commonweal Theatre; PCPA Theatrefest, Target Margin Theatre and with Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter and many others. She has directed children’s theater, as well as, produced shows at Performance Space 122, Baltimore Theater Project and others. She most recently directed Taja Lindley’s The Bag Lady Manifesta at Dixon Place; and is currently conceiving bathtub: a multimedia performance installation event of radical intimacy and surrender by inviting an audience to experience a bath with a Black woman. And Iona Flies Away, a musical, storytelling project with singer-songwriter Kelly Erin Sloan.

Tanisha began working with film/video while creating and performing in an original interdisciplinary media-theater-dance piece Memory is a Body of Water (with Lisa Biggs, PhD and Kristin Horton, Dir.) for The National Black Theater Festival. She went on to work for several production companies and landed on the production team for PBS’ Citizen King. Her experimental shorts flag/body has been screened at international conferences in Australia and Denmark; GroundWater was screened as a part of an intercontinental artist exchange in Panama co-sponsored by the U.S. Embassy in Panama. Her feature length documentary Walk With Me (directed & produced with Ellie Walton), received an Outstanding Documentary Award at Our City Film Festival in DC and was picked up for distribution by Filmbreak/GoDigital and can be seen on Amazon, KweliTV, Google Play and other outlets. She is currently producing Brave Girls about young women in a conservative town in India and is part of JD Urban’s documentary project the Revolution is Uncomfortable.

Tanisha holds a BFA Theatre performance with a concentration in Holistic Drama from Arizona State University, an MA in Media Studies from The New School and is an LMSW -Clinical focus from Hunter College. A member of Actor’s Equity Association, her work has been recognized through an Artist’s Fellowship from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, the Puffin Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Humanities Council of DC. She was a 2015 TMT Institute Fellow at Target Margin Theater, 2016-2018 Artist in Residence at the Brooklyn Arts Exchange (BAX) and is a resident artist at the Second Ward Foundation in Hudson, NY. She is a 2017 MAP Fund grantee for bathtub sponsored by BAX.